Professor AbdulGaniyu Ambali is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Kwara State. In this interview with BIOLA AZEEZ, he speaks on the challenges of running the institution, the education sector, among other.
Many have criticised the recent promotion of your wife by the university, insisting that you were behind it. What is your take on this?
Let me start by saying that the Vice Chancellor does not single-handedly promote any member of staff of the university. It is the Appointment and Promotion Committee (A and PC) that carries out the promotion of members of staff; the Vice Chancellor is just the chair of that committee. Again, promotion emanates from the department, to the faculty and to A and PC. When it comes to the committee’s deliberation and it concerns somebody that is close to the Vice Chancellor, the VC steps aside. The VC is absent during the deliberation so that the people within the committee can feel free to deliberate on it. And that is exactly what happened concerning my wife’s promotion.
Let me give a little insight on the candidate they talked about. As far as the university system is concerned, my wife had almost ten years of teaching experience. She started as lecturer two in 2006 at the University Of Maiduguri (UNIMAID). From 2006 to 2016 is ten years. She was promoted to Lecturer 1 in 2009 at UNIMAID before transferring her services to the University of Ilorin. It was after she passed through the normal processes and she became our staff that she was promoted last year. That is to clarify that aspect of misinformation.
The university recently suspended two members of its staff who were said to be in opposition to your administration. What really happened?
The suspension of the two academic staff purporting to be factional leaders of the University of Ilorin’s Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) underwent the university’s normal regulations. If somebody is trying to cause disaffection within the university system, he has to face the music. One of the persons had two queries before his suspension. Their suspension had nothing to do with the last move they made. The crux of the matter is centered on insubordination by the people concerned because the university has its own code of conduct for all its members of staff including all principal officers and the vice chancellor.
The suspended members of staff had even tried to use some students to destabilise the university system but God has been kind. We have been enjoying sanity here because of the nature of students and members of staff that we have.
As a university, we have our own rules and regulation governing staff conduct. We just followed the book. The staff disciplinary committee sorted that out contrary to what was said by the two people in question. If you recollect, the national ASUU, not too long ago, released a statement suspending the University of Ilorin chapter of ASUU. Expectedly, nobody is supposed to come out under that umbrella to say that he is working for ASUU chapter of the University of Ilorin. As far as the local ASUU is concerned, we have our branch elected by majority of the academic staff within the university and that is what the university management recognises.
How do you explain perceived fraudulent activities as raised by your critics?
That does not have any basis because the university system has its own protocol and we have checks and balances. The university is run under committee system. Nobody can single-handedly do anything without a committee’s approval. No government will give you money and fold its arms and allow you to spend it any how you want. The government gives you list of what to do when it gives you money. After that, they send the accountant-general and auditor-general to make sure the money is spent according to specification. All those allegations are aimed at causing disaffection which they had tried to do in the last two years. They had wanted to drag the university into certain things. Unfortunately things didn’t go the way they wanted it. Because of that, they started blowing false whistles. It is not every referee that blows a whistle that is talking sense. We have to be very careful.
Recently, your administration was accused of refusal to offer admission to about 2,000 after collecting money from. What’s the situation now?
This people are just trying to portray the university negatively. The university has come a long way. In the last three years, we have been the most patronised university with over 100,000 applicants wanting to come and join us. Before now, we had the opportunity of post-UTME where we graded the scores of those candidates to bring in the ones that we wanted. But today that is history as post-UTME has been cancelled. We are now to screen candidates. We decided to set up a committee that came up with the method of screening the candidates. We have over 100,000 applicants competing for between 10,000 and 12,000 spaces. With such, you have to devise a means of telling about 90,000 to go home. We had to do that objectively.
During the first screening before we made any move to admit anybody, we used the screening based on what we had. We had to prune down the number of candidates. Out of the 103,000 that applied, we pruned down to 60,000. We then asked the remaining 60,000 candidates to upload their senior secondary school certificate (SSSC) results. Many people did and based what they uploaded, the committee graded their results.
That was the basis of our first admission list amounting to about 70 percent of our carrying capacity. Probably about 7,000 and we then told them to either accept or reject the admission offer. So many candidates accepted it. And the next stage was for them to attend the screening exercise. They were instructed to come along with the originals of the SSSC results they had uploaded. When they brought them, we compared them with what they uploaded. That was when we saw the difference. Some people that had C6 uploaded B1, some A1. Then we said they had misguided us because it was based on what you uploaded that we graded and offered you provisional admission. That was why we rejected some of the candidates.
Some, instead of giving the grades that they didn’t have, filled in the subjects they did not write during the SSSC examinations. We had different categories of candidates that misguided us when we were doing the grading to arrive at the first batch.
The total number of those that couldn’t make it in the first three batches is not up to 2000. The number is 711. Out of 60,000 candidates, 711 filing in wrong results; the percentage of that is about 20 something or less. The issue of people trying to say we collected their money and refused to offer them admission is uncalled for. They wasted our time. In any civilised society those people should be prosecuted. That is examination malpractice. If ab initio, those candidates used fraudulent means to come in, you can imagine what they would do when if they became our students. But we felt they were young, so they should learn by losing the opportunity. They can reapply. We thought they had to be taught a lesson and that was why we kept quiet.